Where the Tech is She?

Portland’s software industry is booming. So where are all the women?

On a warm morning last June, Mayor Sam Adams stood in
front of a crowd of computer geeks at the Eliot Center in downtown
Portland wearing a scarf stitched with “Open Source Citizen.”

Adams was boasting
about the city’s achievements in information technology, saying that
“software and digital design companies” are one of four key industries
the City of Portland has targeted for its economic development strategy.

“Give yourselves a
round of applause,” he said. “You are one of the most diverse, robust,
creative and fleet-footed, smart and good-looking group of industry
folks in the City of Portland.”

It’s true that in
this sector, business is good. High-tech startups are multiplying
downtown like a cocoon of wet gremlins, raking in headline-grabbing
investments from venture capitalists and hiring like it’s 2007.

“Robust,” “creative,” “fleet-footed” and “smart”? Almost certainly.

But “diverse”?

SOURCE: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Women in the Labor Force: A Databook, 2011

The tech industry in Portland is lacking in racial
diversity, but then again, Portland itself is no great melting pot. The
real story is that this industry, in many ways the most creative,
exciting and promising sector in the Portland economy, is overwhelmingly
male.

A survey of 11 recent
Portland tech startups, ranging from companies with four employees to
80, reveals that their total workforces were typically 70 percent to 80
percent male, while their development and engineering teams—i.e., the
people who write the actual code—have even fewer women. In many cases,
none.

Females are even
scarcer in the open-source software community—people who work on free
and open projects like Linux and Firefox—which is particularly active in
Portland and which the Portland Development Commission cites as a major
“strength” of the local software industry. According to a 2006 study
funded by the European Union, about 1.5 percent of open-source
contributors are women.

“It’s
a huge problem,” says Alex Payne, a former Twitter engineer and founder
of local online banking startup Simple. Payne’s opinion is
public-spirited, but it’s also practical: Groups of young, white men
can’t necessarily make products and software that appeal to a broad
consumer base. “Portland is a very liberal place, a very egalitarian
place,” Payne says. “It would be nice if people’s staff was reflecting
that.”

Portland is not alone
in this challenge, and startups are handicapped by the lack of females
with degrees in the right fields (see chart below).

But
the male-dominated atmosphere can often feed on itself. According to the
National Center for Women & Information Technology, 56 percent of
technical women leave the field at the “mid-level” point of their
careers—double the rate of men, and higher than for science and
engineering.

Besides,
many tech startup executives in Portland say they’re open to hiring
engineers and developers without degrees in the field. So what’s keeping
the women away?

“Brogrammer.”

It’s the latest
buzzword in the industry: A supposed new breed of coders who buck the
traditional shy-geek image with a testosterone-fueled “code-hard,
play-hard” lifestyle reminiscent of The Social Network. Programmer, so the stereotype goes, is the new stockbroker.

“This is not a
brogrammer kind of shop,” says Sam Blackman, the CEO of startup
Elemental Technologies, which makes video software at its downtown
office and employs 69 people, 15 of whom are female. But, he believes,
“there are certain companies that really celebrate that kind of
culture.”

While some consider
startup offices decked out with kegerators, pingpong tables, pinball
machines and video games to be a dream workplace, to others, they look
like, well, frat houses.

“I left [startups]
running and screaming,” says Christie Koehler, who now works as a Web
product engineer at Mozilla (the Firefox people), where she says she’s
no longer pressured to put in ridiculous hours or work next to pinball
machines.

“There’s
a huge overlap with brogrammers and startup culture,” Koehler says. “If
you follow the money aspect, what is more appealing to a [venture
capitalist]: the [guy] who’s going to—grrr!—work 68 hours a week, or the
mom with three kids who’s going to stay at home and have a more
balanced life? Of course the brogrammer. That’s free money.”

Last year, OSCON—a
huge annual open-source convention held in Portland—was forced to adopt a
code of conduct amid allegations of sexist presentations, parties
staffed by “Hooters girls,” and men stalking, harassing and grabbing the
butts of women attendees. Several speakers pulled out of the 2011
conference until O’Reilly Media, the producer of OSCON, agreed to write a
code.

“When we learned in
more detail about issues of harassment that had happened at past OSCONs
and at other tech conferences, we wanted to take steps to prevent
harassment from happening again,” says Suzanne Axtell, O’Reilly’s
communications manager. “It’s an unfortunate fact that harassment and
discrimination still happen in our industry.... More and more evidence
points to diversity as a key to making technologies, products and teams
better.”

SOURCE: Oregon University System

Jessamyn Smith is an
engineer at Urban Airship, one of Portland’s most successful new
startups, with $21.6 million in venture-capital funding to its name.
Smith is an easygoing woman with short-cropped hair, a strong Canadian
accent and a pendant of Ada Lovelace (a 19th-century British countess
who is regarded by some as the world’s first computer
programmer—ironically, computer programming was considered “women’s
work” as late as the 1960s). She is among four female “technical”
employees out of 48 at the company. (An “engineer” at a tech company in
the U.S. is not necessarily a qualified engineer, just as people titled
“architects” and “ninjas” in the industry are typically neither. Smith
is a qualified engineer, one of four women who graduated from computer
engineering at her university in Canada.)

Smith says like many
women in the industry, she distanced herself from being a “feminist” and
wouldn’t speak up when she heard a sexist joke. Now a 10-year
programming veteran, she’s finding her voice.

“I went through a
real change in the last few years, from sort of feeling we just have to
make it work to ‘Why should we do all the accommodating?’” she says.
“Maybe the guys should accommodate us sometimes.”

A few months ago,
Smith decided to make it happen. Someone at Urban Airship had created a
“bot” that periodically inserted the phrase “that’s what she said” into
conversation on the work IRC (it’s a sort of chat network) channel.

“This bot was just
getting on my nerves,” she said. “I was trying to explain why the joke
was sexist and not a very good joke, and they weren’t really listening.
It was frustrating. And then it came to me in a flash one night after
work....”

Smith created her own
bot, one that would respond to every “that’s what she said” with a
quote from a notable woman like Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Austen or even
Madonna. “I was amazed by some of the really quiet guys, who hardly say
anything, who said, ‘Thank you for doing that,’” she says.

But not everyone appreciated it.

Smith posted the story and code on her personal blog, and it soon spread online.

“There
are plenty of employees who like their company that way and if she
didn’t she is not really suited for the company culture. She can (and
should) seek employment elsewhere. She will be better of [sic] there,” opined one online commenter. “This proves that—women—python programmers have no sense of humor,” said another.

“Before
we had Jessamyn, we didn’t have any women,” says Mike Herrick, Urban
Airship’s vice president of engineering. “We didn’t have any diversity
at all—it was all a bunch of white men. While we were still a success as
a company, there was definitely something lacking.... Software is a creative pursuit and an art form. Diversity makes it happen better.”

SHE’S ALL IN: Monica Enand of Zapproved says founding a tech startup isn’t just a job, it’s a lifestyle.

According to a 2007 study conducted by Stanford
University, the future diversity of a startup is established early—tech
startups that hire the fewest number of women tend to be those that
emphasize finding employees that “fit” with the company culture, where
“employees exhibit strong feelings of belonging to the firm as they
belong to family.”

Alex Payne of Simple,
the online banking startup, employs 35 people, five of whom are women,
though none of those are engineers. He says having no female engineers
is a big concern for the company. At Twitter, he says, one of the
company’s first engineering hires was a woman, which set a precedent and
helped the company diversify its workforce.

“I’ve seen other
companies start out who don’t have women on their core engineering team,
and they never break out of that cycle,” Payne says.

Working
for a startup can be incredibly demanding. It’s rarely a 9-to-5 job for
those in technical and leadership roles. It is not unusual for
engineers to be “on call” all night or weekends.

“It’s
an all-in proposition,” says Monica Enand, the founder and CEO of
Hillsboro-based startup Zapproved, which makes Web-based
legal-compliance software and has four female employees out of 14. “And I
think that’s harder for women than it is for men; you have to have a
really supportive family structure, or you have to be young enough that
you don’t have kids. And that’s a big part of why women don’t stay in
it.”

Enand was the only
female computer-engineering graduate in her year at Pittsburgh’s
Carnegie Mellon University, one of the country’s top technology schools.
After graduating in 1993, she flew straight to Hillsboro to work at
Intel, where she worked on advanced microprocessor technology.

“There was this young
culture, smart people, you worked all the time and we loved it,” says
Enand, a small woman with a big smile and polished patter that belies
her MBA (she’s got one of those as well) more so than her CE degree.

But
after having kids, she found it impossible to be “all in” like the men
were, and although Intel—which by many accounts has a strong
human-resources department and is a positive place for a woman—was
supportive, she decided to move on.

Enand
says this is just the way it has to be. “If you’re going to push the
envelope of technology, there’s going to be a core group of really smart
people who work all the time to make it happen,” she says. And tech
startups are no different. “It’s not a job,” says Enand, who has been
back working “all in” at Zapproved for four years. “It’s a lifestyle.”

Enand says she
doesn’t think her gender has held her back in securing funding, although
she does acknowledge that there is a bit of a “boys’ club” in town.

“There’s a sort of
male bravado around the startup,” she says, laughing. “The culture
around the startup CEO, it’s very—testosteroney! There’s a lot of that:
You’re up against the odds! And you never quit! A lot of those startup
leaders, y’know, drink at the Teardrop [Lounge in the Pearl District],
and it’s about how much drinking they do.”

Despite the low numbers of women working in the tech industry here, Portland does have a vibrant community of female geeks.

Christie Koehler runs
two monthly meet-ups for women in Portland’s tech community: Women Who
Hack, where women get together to work on their computer projects, and
Code ’n’ Splode, a women-majority event she compares to knitting group
Stitch ’n Bitch.

“The first part of it
is a technical presentation, and then we go out to a pub, and that’s
when people talk through shit they’ve had to go through in the last
month at work, what’s the latest thing on Hacker News—people who are
regular members save up things for that part of the meeting,” Koehler
says. “I feel good about working and providing a space where, two or
five hours a month, we can just work on the tech and know a guy’s not
going to take away the keyboard or ‘mansplain’ something.”

And in March, around
65 women attended Portland’s inaugural Geek Girl Dinner, an event with
chapters all over the world where women in the local tech industry get
together to network and listen to talks.

Many say Portland’s
community of female geeks is already more supportive and cohesive than
in Silicon Valley. It’s up to the local companies to connect with it—and
even market it to attract potential female recruits from across the
country.

CODING FOR CHANGE: Michelle Rowley (center) wants to bring more women into the tech community by teaching them the Python programming language.

IMAGE: rosnaps.com

On a drizzly March evening, in the big concrete bowels of
the event space at Urban Airship, is another event geared toward
women—though it may not look like it at first. Of the 40-odd people
tapping away on laptops, eating Hot Lips pizza and helping themselves to
beer from Urban’s two kegerators, just five are women.

But the event’s
organizer, Michelle Rowley, says this is a great success. Four months
ago, she was the only woman attending the local Python
programming-language user group. A self-taught, self-employed
programmer, she says she was discouraged by her college from studying
computer science at a tertiary level (she studied French and geography
instead), and began teaching herself Python in 2005 after hitting a
“thick glass ceiling” doing tech support in the beer industry.

She’s hoping to
replicate a project by the Boston Python User Group, which grew from 2
percent to 15 percent women and up to 1,700 people in six months, by
inviting women as beginners and training them as Python programmers and
community members.

Rowley has created
this new monthly “hack night” so the women she plans to invite—and the
friends she hopes they’ll bring—will have a place to learn and practice
their new skills.

One woman, who works
as an intern at TriMet doing computer mapping, is here for her first
lesson in Python. She is paired up for a one-on-one session with an
experienced programmer. “I feel like if I keep working at this, I might
have a chance at making more money than [my husband] some day,” she
says.

As if to emphasize
the point, a representative from online-search startup Trapit
immediately stands on a table to announce his company is hiring. “We’re
right across the street from Bunk Bar!” he says.

Rowley is not alone
in her vision. Many in Portland believe that programs like this could
help turn the numbers of women in computing around, making up where the
university system is failing.

Payne says Simple
runs classes for its customer-service staff in a programming language,
while one of his female customer-service employees is also learning a
second.

When an accountant at
Urban Airship expressed a desire to become an engineer, Herrick says he
organized for her to be mentored in learning Python.

“If we work through
the pipeline, it’s going to take forever,” says Urban’s Smith. “We just
need to get girls who are doing different jobs and want new jobs to get
into programming, and we could change it in a couple of years. That’s
what I want to see happening.”

Rowley is holding the
first open Python workshop for new female programmers and their friends
in June. By this time next year, she too wants 15 percent of Portland’s
Python programmers to be women.

“I did an experiment a
few months back where I picked a couple women in my mind, and I just
personally pinged them [online] and said, ‘Hey, do you want to come to
this thing?’” she says. “One said, ‘I don’t know anyone, I don’t really
want to go,’ and I said, ‘What if we met beforehand and got coffee, and
then we would know each other?’ and she said OK. All she needed was a
personal invitation and to feel like ‘I do belong, I am welcome here.’”

The culture of the
tech industry won’t change until there’s a critical mass of women,
Rowley says. And the only way she can think to help change that is to
systematically invite the women, one by one.

“Hey,” she asks me, “are you interested in learning to code?”

FULL DISCLOSURE: 35 percent of Willamette Week’s employees are women, including 22 percent in the news room.

"In the low usage areas, we found that our vehicles sit idle four times longer, ultimately affecting overall vehicle availability for the Portland membership base, as well as parking for the Portland community."

News
East Portland can't catch a break.Just this week KGW had a story called, "Diverse, non-cool East Por... More